Field of the Invention
The embodiments disclosed herein relate to traffic event investigations and, more particularly, to systems and associated methods for traffic event data source identification, traffic event data collection and traffic event data storage.
Description of the Related Art
Investigators from various different governmental and private organizations (e.g., local and/or state police departments, insurance companies, automobile manufacturers, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), etc.) often investigate the circumstances surrounding a traffic event (i.e., a traffic accident or other traffic-related incident) to determine cause, fault, aggravating factors, mitigating factors, etc. Typically, investigators from the different organizations independently collect the information necessary to make such determinations by manually identifying and tracking down specific data sources and then acquiring data from each of those data sources. Unfortunately, collecting the information in this manner can be time consuming. Additionally, some data sources may go unidentified and/or by the time they are identified the data may no longer be available (e.g., may be deleted). Therefore, there is a need in the art for systems and associated methods, which provide for automatically identifying data sources with data about a traffic event, for collecting the data from those data sources in a timely manner, and for storing the collected data in a central location.